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Thursday, December 17, 2015

Stop The Bullshit

Stop The War Takes Down A Third Article From Its Website. “The second was a widely criticised article that appeared to praise the “spirit of internationalism and solidarity” of ISIS… On Friday, it emerged that a third piece had been taken down from the website: an article that said in its headline that it was “Time to go to war with Israel”.

This particular paragraph taken from one of the articles illustrates the problem with Stop The War, among other anti-imperialist movements, that is, when America or some other Western power can be said to be involved: they romanticize Islamist terrorist movements by buying into their hype, that is, by believing that they actually stand for the oppressed and for “authenticity,” – being true to their culture contrary to those secular-minded bastards who want to ruin the culture by modernizing it.

The Far Right and the Far Left have often benefited each other in variety of ways: by pointing to each other’s extremism to validate their positions, by considering extremism as the only legitimate expression of what Right and Left are all about (you know “really”), and by pushing their governments and peoples to adopt policies that directly and indirectly, end up benefiting the other side, even if unwittingly.

It’s not strange to note that the two sides have always been prone to believing and actively churning all sorts of conspiracy theories, as the phenomenon itself comes as a reflection of a deeply religious mindset, even when some of their adherents claim to be staunchly secular. The creeds of the two sides might differ, but the puritanism is the same, as well as that desire to see order, a master plan, a mover that can be personified, rather than some abstract objective laws that only few might be able to grasp and which many not add any sense of absoluteness or finality of meaning to the emerging picture of being.

In final analysis, and despite all their criticism of imperialism and war, these people are from being pacifists. To them, pacifism is simply a tool used to prevent actions by Western countries, irrespective of the goals and motivations involved, while justifying aggression by other powers as some form of resistance to Western hegemony. Questions of human rights and democracy promotion are irrelevant to these pacifists, who often seem to harbor racist views towards the inhabitants of the developing world, deeming ill-suited to handle the challenges of modernity. Hence their willingness to accept the claims by Jihadists and Islamists that they represent the more authentic embodiment of the values of “those people.”

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World